API

Providing users with programmatic control of their infrastructure has always been one of the primary value propositions of the Rackspace Cloud. The ability to deploy and manage a wide array of cloud resources with a few lines of code has brought new levels of automated efficiency to the IT industry and revolutionized how we think about managing our applications and workloads.

Last week, the Federal Circuit overturned the District Court judgment in Oracle v. Google, finding that the Java API is copyrightable. This move overturns the expectations of businesses and developers and is likely to negatively impact how they leverage APIs going forward. We have been thinking a lot about the ruling since it came down, putting together our thoughts.

As promised last year, we are committed to simplifying database management with Rackspace Cloud Databases. Starting today you can customize configuration settings for Cloud Databases instances using the API or Trove command line tool. This capability allows you to optimize configuration settings based on the needs of your workload.

Over the past few months we have been working hard to provide more automation capabilities for the Rackspace Cloud. In November we told you about Auto Scale, which allows you to define rules to grow or shrink your cloud. Back in August we told you about Deployments, a Control Panel capability that allows you to deploy common applications with a point-and-click interface and based on our best practices.

After attending SXSW Interactive for the past two years, I’ve noticed the industry seems to be shifting away from the Age of the Apps to the Dawn of Data. Rather than focusing on that next killer application, it appears that more people are trying to tap into the data that is being gathered to create the next big thing—and companies are actively encouraging developers to do so.

Since we launched Rackspace Cloud Databases in August 2012 we have experienced great commitment from our customers who have chosen it as their database platform. In this time, we have expanded the availability of Cloud Databases from three to six regions worldwide, keeping the pricing simple, improving reliability and increasing performance.

Rackspace Cloud Queues is backed by the open source project, Marconi. Below, Oz Akan, Development Manager for Rackspace Cloud Queues and an active contributor to Marconi, walks us through the project. Want to try out Marconi without managing your own environment? Want to explore open source code with the comfort of Fanatical Support behind you? Rackspace Cloud Queues is currently accepting Early Access participants. Sign up here.

Starting today, you can begin testing and exploring the Rackspace Cloud Queues service, a new tool designed to address the needs of large, distributed applications. Cloud Queues gives you a simple API to manage both a producer-consumer and a publisher-subscriber queuing and notifications service.

The dedicated world and cloud world can perform differently. Fortunately developers building on the cloud have an excellent resource in the Cloud Launch Team. Architecting an application that takes full advantage of the scalability and flexibility of the cloud is key. Our Launch Managers are here to help with any questions that you may have, advising not only on architecture but how to incorporate the Cloud API, different database solutions and types of storage options. At Rackspace, we have the expertise (and the SLAs) to support developers. Check out this video to find out more.